The Unreasonable Silence of the World

Universal Reason and the Wreck of the Enlightenment Project

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Joseph Wayne Smith

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138367036
• eBook ISBN: 9780429770296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Published in 1997. This book develops a postmodernist critique of philosophy - although not the postmodernism of literary philosophers such as Derrida. This postmodernism is one of ecological limitationism coupled with a practical common sense 'realism'. The authors affirm the reality of life-world and the primacy of practice against materialists, physicalists and reductionists. They attempt to show that orthodox Anglo-American analytic philosophy is not merely incapable of completing its own quest to supply a regionally justified system of reality, but, more importantly, it fails as well to meet the challenges of the age.

1 Ragpicking amidst the wasteland’s debris: the unreasonable silence of philosophy

Except among heretics, all Western metaphysics has been peephole metaphysics. The subject—a mere limited moment—was locked up in its own self by that metaphysics, imprisoned for all eternity to punish it for its deification. As through the crenels of a parapet, the subject gazes upon a black sky in which the star of the idea, or Being, is said to rise. And it is the very wall around the subject that casts its shadow on whatever the subject conjures: the shadow of reification, which a subjective philosophy will then fight against...There is no peeping out. What would lie in the beyond makes its appearance only in the materials and categories within.

Adorno, Negative Dialectics

The dominant tendency in analytic philosophy in Australia is affectionately known as Australian materialism. This home-grown form of a universal scientific reason, with its mechanistic materialist metaphysics grounded in the natural sciences, has been internationally successful. It has overcome the traditional cultural cringe of an ex-colony towards Europe and America, and has facilitated the development of a national philosophical culture. It has also enabled Australian philosophers to stride assuredly on the international Anglo-American stage, thereby putting Australian philosophy on the global map. Australian analytic philosophy is now internationally identified as a naturalistic, scientific realism, in which philosophy underlabourers for science to develop a physicalist metaphysics. This down-to-earth sparse materialism, which is held to reflect accurately the strong sunlight, harsh brown landscape and wide open spaces of Australia, is generally empiricist, typically physicalist, and resolutely reductionist. The mechanistic world picture that results from a universal scientific reason's self-validating knowledge of the pristine inner structure of the world, embodies the central values of the materialist Enlightenment. This tradition assumes that progress in scientific knowledge in seeking the Truth can be used to make the world a happier place for the majority. By using science and technology to control and master nature, we can ease our pain and increase our pleasure. Moral and political progress towards an enlightened and tolerant society then results. The role of philosophy in the public, liberal culture of late capitalism is to defend this materialist Enlightenment tradition, that has been successfully transplanted from Europe, and has grown up on Australian soil to philosophically underpin a secular liberal culture.

Yet Australian materialism's 15 minutes of fame may well have passed. The signs are there. The early work of the Australian materialists, with their physics-worship and utilitarian ethics has an unmistakably dated air, as French poststructuralism now seductively dances in the spotlight. Anglo-American philosophers have more or less appropriated what they found useful in the work of early Australian materialists of the 1960s and 70s, and they have rejected both its utilitarianism, and the strong reductionism of its unity of science programme.¹ The current adherents of the Australian materialist tradition now find themselves working on the edges of the work of the big names overseas, who are now making the running on the key issues.² It is the central American texts of physicalist materialism we currently read, not the Australian ones, as the production of philosophical texts has slowed in the Australian periphery. It remains unclear how Australian intellectuals will find a niche in the global market. The absence of an academic star system, coupled with the savage cuts to education, increased teaching and administrative loads, the centralization of research and the contraction of the broad postwar expansion of the universities, suggests that Australia will increasingly rely on overseas ideas rather than produce its own. Many who encountered reductive naturalism in the philosophy institution voted with their feet, as they left philosophy for politics, sociology, or cultural studies. The judgement they made was simple. Philosophy had lost its nerve and staying power, whilst its fetishizing of technique and dead totemic classics meant that it was no longer in tune with the advanced possibilities that history presented. The response to the increasing calcification of the Australian philosophical tradition has been to establish a special relationship with the American materialists in the metropolitan universities, and to provide a research home for those philosophers made homeless from the British universities by the economic logic of Thatcherism. These signs point to a slow painful death of analytic philosophy in Australia.

If the signs of the passing of Australian materialism from its moment in history's spotlight are evident, the effects of its increasing displacement by poststructuralism are not. We are just beginning to deal with the implications, and we do not yet have a picture of our condition within the late modern cultural landscape. Those of us who are not wandering postmodern cosmopolitan intellectuals, who are not firmly entrenched in the academic professoriate, or who are not able to become freelance intellectuals producing substantial bodies of work that sell millions, realize that we are forced to confront the politics of localism in the university during a period of economic contraction. We marginalized locals realize that we do not have the power to act at the global level, and so have to make do as best we can with a micro-politics of localism. As the philosophy discipline contracts, we increasingly find ourselves as unemployed philosophers, forced to survive on grants and part-time teaching, whilst confronting a closed, elitist academic world of philosophy that provides little opportunity for employing different philosophical voices. In trying to find our way in the world as philosophers, we continually crash into a universal reason that operates in terms of a restricted canon of philosophical problems. We continually collide into a philosophical discourse that constructs the readership of its books in terms of the narrow audience of one's immediate peers in the academy, has a deep suspicion of publicity and notoriety, and demands a certain kind of formal, scientific prose which alienates the philosophical text from a public readership.³ We unemployed locals find ourselves increasingly marginalized and alienated from the self-assertive, self-confident philosophical tradition that it is full of strong, bold achievers who have done great things. We do not share its future hope, that in working on the hard problems at the cutting edge of neuroscience and philosophy, the analytic, materialist tradition will continue to do great things in the near future in terms of computational models of mind. Our future fear is an apocalyptic anxiety that this research programme will develop cyborgs for the war machine.

Unemployed, alienated philosophers have the free time for individual self-realization through philosophical labour, and they can achieve this by becoming critics of the analytic philosophical tradition. But such self-realization does not automatically entail recognition by other subjects. In reflecting on our experience of marginalization, we frame it as a rejection that forces an identity crisis. The rejection wounds, as it means living with resentment and pain, whilst continually putting up with being a negative object by the self-confident, established, tenured analytic philosophers. We rejected philosophers are not given recognition, as we are wrongly treated by others, in that our work is seen as the personal rumblings of discontent. It is not recognized as the philosophical continuation of a New Left linked to the rebellious and progressive nature of social protest of the new social movements, who hang onto a sense that the future should be better than the present and the past. We unemployed critics of academic philosophy are also seen as second rate, as never being as good as those overseas. We find our self-confidence being undermined, as we are continually being dismissed or ignored. These insulting and humiliating forms of disrespect represent the denial of recognition with regard to the positive understanding of ourselves that we had intersubjectively acquired.

The dual process of philosophical dissonance and radicalism underpins the need to give our resentment philosophical justification. This justification starts at the point where the analytic philosophical tradition represents our life experiences as mere appearance, a simulacra. The whole driving force of this tradition is the Platonic desire to get out of the cave of the everyday, and to aspire intelligibly to a transcendent world of scientific knowledge beyond the cave. Those left inside the cave with their discontents and prejudices are rejected by the mechanistic system, and discarded as rubbish. We unemployed locals experience this as living in the wasteland by the sewer outlets, where we are obliged to pick over the philosophical scraps and recycle them, if we desire to have a modest career as philosophers. We declassed, philosophical ragpickers are seen by our socially superior masters—the philosophical elite—as being not too bright, as impoverished, inhibited, dependent and rather weak. We are seen by our academic masters as pathetically huddled together in our paranoia, bitterly vindictive, plotting and scheming for part-time work; ambitious and self-seeking in terms of a career, yet continually frustrated by the obstacles not of our own making. Our sickly resentment at this disesteem is fuelled by the lack of help, support or encouragement for a questioning of, or departing from, the philosophical tradition. Resentment poisons us, even as it makes us think in terms of power. We seethe and fume, wishing to humiliate those who use their power to marginalize us.

The genuine disincentives within the academic system for those unemployed philosophers who desire to write for a general educated readership in civil society deepens the resentment and existential opposition to the philosophy establishment. The existence of a viable indigenous publishing industry, does not ease this smouldering resentment, as the print and media and publishing industry are not active in promoting and popularizing new directions in social, cultural and political thinking. Australia remains a large-scale importer of culture, and the small national market, which is dominated by multinationals, leaves little room to foster new and untested ideas, written, edited, published and marketed locally. Australian books still do not sell well overseas, even when Australian publishers have established co-publications with overseas publishers.⁴ So Australia now produces only a few published thinkers who can function as public intellectuals in the public sphere in civil society. This impacts destructively on the cave-dwelling, unemployed, ragpicking philosophers, who exist between the rock of the philosophical establishment and a hard place of independent intellectuals. We become envious, rebellious and resentful, as we react against a world we did not make, and which we see as being ruled by people who do not deserve their advantages, tenure and privileges. Enduring the injustice of our existential situation stunts us, and we seethe with frustration, we struggle to figure out ways we can regain sovereign control over the conditions of our work from the well-fed, famous, academic philosophers in the pay of the state.

The emotional complex of bitterness, resentment and suffering can make one either long to side with the masters and their elitist values, or become sick or mad, or compensate for the humiliation by seeking revenge. When resentment is channelled into creativity it can provide the ground that pushes towards a critical distance from the philosophical world as a mad-house and a prison. We modest ragpickers can use our creativity to redefine the Socratic project: rather than leaving the cave for the world outside—Socrates never did leave the Athenian cave—we can do battle with the underlying assumptions of our own cave. There is no "outside the cave" of the philosophical tradition in modernity. The aspiration of Australian materialism to transcend the cave of the shared culture of the everyday world in late capitalist modernity, is based on a delusion that requires the intervention of a psychoanalytically informed philosophy. Resentment channelled into the creativity of a therapeutic philosophy becomes the self-reflexive rupture from the diseased master discourse of analytic philosophy. This rupture starts from defying philosophy's striving for a universality that transcends national custom and tradition, so that philosophy's project is deemed to be valid for all cultures, languages, peoples and histories. It is a defiance based on the existential focus on the here-and-now in this regional culture, with this particular philosophical practice, in this particular philosophical cave. Self-reflexive resentment is a tearing free from the canon of questions and modes of inquiry that have been handed down; and in its resistance and challenge to the reigning assumptions of professional philosophy and the academic establishment, it seeks a common front with those postmodernists who question the liberal assumptions of the culture of late capitalist modernity. The postmodern negative stance against the easy confidence and optimism of the Enlightenment starts with an expression of disappointment, expresses frustration and resentment, and speaks in terms of the collapse, ruin and death of tradition. It expresses the mood that it is a good time for taking stock and settling accounts, as many of the insular practices of Australian universities are being called into question with the increasing commodification of knowledge.⁵

This reactive questioning makes for a complex relation to the law of the philosophical tradition for the declassed, ragpicker philosophers. The rupture from tradition can only be made intelligible if it can demonstrate the points of continued contact with tradition; but it does so in terms of a project that speaks of something other than that of which the tradition speaks. It means the need to think within the context of the philosophical tradition determined by the demand for universality, whilst affirming the particularity of the existential situation we find ourselves within. These tensions can be initially resolved by brushing the particular Australian variant of the Enlightenment tradition in the wrong way, whilst remaining committed to the tradition's universal ideals of using reason to make a better world for all. This starts by breaking away the types of problems and modes of thinking associated with an abstract universal reason's conception of disembodied truth and rationality. Here Western intellectuals legislate for the good society in the name of a transhistorical mathematical science which gives us absolute truth of reality as it really is-in-itself. Such a modest beginning of "breaking away" can make no claim to capture or grasp the metaphysics of physicalist materialism as a whole, by pinning it down like a butterfly on the dissecting table, highlighting all its flaws with incisive cuts of a post mortem dissection. The initial work is more of an anti-text which p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Ragpicking amidst the wasteland's debris: the unreasonable silence of philosophy
• 2. Reason in and out of history
• 3. Cruising with pastiche on the dialectical highway
• 4. Nietzsche contra scientism
• 5. Nihilism, value in a disenchanted modernity
• 6. Has philosophy come to an end?
• Index